Transactional Quantum Mechanics
Transactional Quantum Mechanics (TQM) is a pseudo-nanoeconomic formulation of quantum theory on the basis of state evolution being representable as a sequence of entanglement operations that are referred to as 'transactions' between the initial quantum system and the electromagnetic potentials around it, that are represented as an evolving nanoeconomy. Intro Entanglement Entropy Due to entropic fluctuations in the environment of any incompletely-isolated quantum system, the approximations of quantum theory tend to only describe reality on spacetime-scales that approach quantum limits. This essentially means that even if the state of the system can be known with 100% certainty at a given point in spacetime via precise measurement, there is no way to accurately predict the state of that system at another point in spacetime that extends beyond a 'coherent wave-lengths' of the initial measurement. For a well-isolated system, the coherence wave can be highly resonant and extend far into the future (and past) space-time of the system, allowing the future (and past) state to be predicted (and retro-dicted) with similarly high confidence (e.g. 90% certainty of the system's state even after 10 hours, or 10 ms, or 10 ns). The most critical detriment of the coherence is temperature fluctuations in the environment at the frequency of the system's resonant coherence wave. This is entanglement entropy. Entropy as Economic Uncertainty When a 'hot' environment interferes with the coherence of a system, the ability to predict its future state is diminished because the information-dense system is becoming randomly entangled with the information-sparse outside environment. This entropy gradient obeys the SLoTD and hence the information-purity of the observer-system relative-state always tends to zero as external entropy increases. Macroscopic physics tends to obey macrocausality due to these statistical trends and hence quantum mechanics tends to only accurately describe microcausal systems. The development of TQM has primarily been driven by recognition of similarities between the macrocausality/microcausality duality and the macroeconomics/microeconomics duality. Lack of data for economic theorists at a micro-level led to economics being developed primarily from a macroeconomic perspective, in terms of macro-scale forces like 'supply' and 'demand'. However, nanoeconomic theory has emphasised that nano-scale forces are the only 'real' economic forces, which just interfere constructively and destructively to form the mean-effects of 'supply', 'demand', 'wages' and 'employment'. In developing informationally-complete transaction ledgers (via the blockchain), nanoeconomics has allowed for the certainty of economic measurements to be quantified. In a similar way, transactional quantum mechanics is able to remove time-asymmetry from earlier formulations of quantum mechanics with the addition of a 'noise function' that works retrocausally to retrodict past states on the basis of what environmental fluctuations are likely to have occured along that spacetime path. Transaction Entanglement Every measurement is a transaction between system and observer. The primary transactant is the state information being inspected by the apparatus. The primary transactors are the measurement apparatus and the observed system. However, the apparatus-observer interchange also acts as a transaction link (albeit a typically lossless one) and more critically the system-environment interchange tends to be the lossiest external link in a quantum experiment. The benefit of the TQM formulation is that it allows the lossiness of environmental uncertainty to be quantified and built into the state evolution operator such that state evolution is no longer predicted on the basis of a single path, but on the basis of a sum over all probable paths. Multi-dimensional Wave Vectors In order to represent this sum, wave-vectors in TQM are replicated over the spectrum of the environmental entropy function. Entropy functions are defined on the basis of possible transactions that could have occurred between the system and the environment. The fundamental transaction is defined as an environment-system 'flip-flop' in which the system has one or more of its eigen-components undergo a phase change of 180°. = Category:Quantum Philosophy Category:Quantum Mechanics Category:Nanoeconomics